LEWISTON — When John Reeder was 13, living near Seattle, a good friend’s father was a chiropractor.

The man was successful, he drove a Cadillac and he was nice, treating Reeder like any average teenager, something the orphan and frequent runaway wasn’t used to.

Too often people had written him off as “dumb” or “disadvantaged.”

He saw the chiropractor and he wanted all that, that life.

Reeder got it. And more.

All with plenty of adventure along the way: Hopping a bus to Reno, inspired by Elvis. Living in a brothel. Standing up his wife-to-be on their first date for a ski trip, getting hit with a ski and knocking out all his bottom front teeth.

And then, eventually, a career in Lewiston, five children with wife, Mickey, and countless trips over the Twin Cities in his hot air balloon.

In January, Reeder started the latest adventure: Retirement.

“We’ve got plans to come,” he said.

Reeder grew up around Seattle. His mother died when he was 10 and he said he never knew his father. In between stretches in foster homes, he called Briscoe Memorial School home, a school and orphanage run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers.

“I’d go out the window and climb down the drain and I’d run away, constantly, run away,” Reeder, 71, said.

He attended 12 different schools by the time he graduated high school. Not too long after, he and a friend, inspired by the Elvis Presley movie “Follow that Dream,” sold everything they owned and took a bus to Reno, Nev.

“It was just one of those things, follow that dream,” Reeder said. “I didn’t have any ties. If I had a wild hair, I could do it.”

As a young man, he moved around as opportunity presented itself. One time it was for a lifeguard job in New York. Once there, he charmed his way into working for a railway executive as a sort of one-man complaint department.

“(One time) we had a whole shipment of white mice that fell off a platform at Port Authority,” Reeder said. Though he doesn’t remember his fix for that, “whatever it was, I got it taken care of. I could talk myself into or out of anything.”

He was drafted into the Army in 1967, eventually sent to work at Walter Reed Army Medical Center because of the years of chiropractic schooling he’d logged by then. He helped treat soldiers wounded in the worst ways.

“You need to do everything, plus you had to keep the guys upbeat,” Reeder said. “They’d give me the shell-shocked guys.”

He met Mickey in a D.C. bar — and found out later that she, too, had planned to stand him up on their first date. A month or two later, he proposed.

The couple married a few months after that and returned to her native Maine in 1972 after he finished his service in the Army and graduated with his chiropractic degree. He’d seen a bulletin at the college about a practice that had just opened up in Lewiston when the doctor, a man with seven children, died suddenly of a heart attack.

“It wasn’t easy to get chiropractors into the state of Maine. I had never been here,” Reeder said. When he told a local banker, “‘You realize I don’t have any money?’ ‘It’s OK, you’re a doctor. Just sign here.’ That’s how easy it was, and the rest is history.”

He fought hard in the early years, he said, for legitimacy and respect for the profession, once debating on live TV when the Maine Legislature considered a bill that would have banned chiropracting in the state. The bill later died. 

“I used to have a sign that I taped across the dash in my car, and what it said was ‘Fight for it,'” Reeder said.

The couple had the first hot air balloon in the area and helped at the Great Falls Balloon Festival from the start. That, too, was about changing minds, he said, lifting up the image of the area, “not only in the eyes of the people here, but around the state.”

“I love this community,” Reeder said. “To me, this is a community that has gone through some of what I’ve gone through.”

It’s been scrappy and it’s persevered.

In January, he passed his practice on to their son, Patrick.

After such a busy life, what comes next?

“I have the next 20 to 30 years to think about things to do,” he said.

Know someone everyone knows? Contact staff writer Kathryn Skelton at 689-2844 or kskelton@sunjournal.com